Field of Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to batting tees and specifically to the measurement of bat speed and ball exit velocity in the use of batting tees.
Related Art
An increasingly popular metric in measuring the effectiveness of a baseball or softball hitter's swing is the velocity of the ball in-flight after contact with the ball with a ball bat (“ball exit velocity”) with the objective to drive the ball away from the hitter. Greater ball exit velocity of the ball in-flight after contact with the bat is representative of the hitter initiating contact with the ball with a greater portion of the bat and with greater precision and is thus representative of a more effective swing associated with the hitter. Lesser ball exit velocity after contact with the bat is representative of the hitter initiating contact with the ball with a lesser portion of the bat and with lesser precision and is thus representative of a less effective swing associated with the hitter.
Conventional methods in measuring ball exit velocity include the implementation of a radar detector held by an operator in which the operator attempts to aim the radar detector at the ball after making contact with the bat and measure the ball exit velocity as the ball travels away from the bat. However, the ball exit velocity decreases rapidly during the travel of the ball after the ball initiates contact with the bat. Thus, the operator that attempts to measure the ball exit velocity of the ball as the ball travels after initiating contact with the bat measures a ball exit velocity that is decreasing as the ball travels. Such a measured ball exit velocity can be significantly less than the ball exit velocity of the ball in-flight after the ball makes contact with the bat resulting in an inaccurate assessment in the effectiveness of the hitter's swing.
Additionally, when the operator aims the radar detector at the ball after making contact with the bat, the radar detector may be at an angle relative to the travel path of the ball which skews the measurements of the ball exit velocity. Rather than measuring the ball exit velocity, an angle between the radar detector and the travel path of the ball can result in the cosine of the ball exit velocity being measured by the radar detector, particularly those operating on the Doppler principle. The cosine of the ball exit velocity can be significantly less than the actual ball exit velocity, which again results in an inaccurate assessment in the effectiveness of the hitter's swing. Since the angle can be different from measurement to measurement, it can be difficult to take the angle into account in comparing or evaluating measurements without the use of a complex and expensive radar system.
The present disclosure will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawings in which an element first appears is generally indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the reference number.